When James Giles did not reply, Sarah Geals took a loaded pistol to the workshop. There was an accident and it misfired, and she gave herself up for arrest. Sarah Geals was not prosecuted for passing as a man nor for being a female husband, and there was no inquiry as to the female husband and wife sexual activity. She was accused only of attempting to murder James Giles, and the misfiring of the pistol meant that her sentence was five years’ penal servitude.307

  Lia de Beaumont, Mademoiselle d’Éon, a French-born aristocrat, became the subject of a huge wager in London in 1776, printed in the Westminster Gazette:

  This gentleman declares the d’Eon (alias the Chevalier d’Eon) a WOMAN in the clearest sense of the word; this declaration he supports with a bet of any such sum of money from one to five thousand guineas, or he proposes to any one, who will deposit five thousand guineas in the hand of his banker, to pay £10,000 if d’Eon proves herself either a MAN and HERMAPHRODITE or any other animal other than a WOMAN.308

  Charles Geneviève Louis Auguste André Timothée d’Éon de Beaumont (1728–1810) had been declared a boy at birth in order to inherit the male-line title. Raised as a boy, he became a French lawyer and intellectual, disguised himself as a woman to spy on Russia, but then reverted to male appearance to serve as a French diplomat, a captain of Dragoons and the leader of the French peace delegation to London. He was awarded with a royal and military order and the title ‘Chevalier’, and ordered by the French to spy on England and prepare for a French invasion.

  The Chevalier d’Éon dressed as a woman for the spying mission, and moved in London society as Lia de Beaumont. After doubts were raised about her sex, a betting pool started on the London Stock Exchange, offering odds of 3:2 that the Chevalier was a woman.309 Lia may have planted the rumours herself, to prompt her return to France as a patriotic heroine, or she may have been getting a commission on the bets.310

  The death of Louis XV closed the spy network and the new king, Louis XVI, paid for secret papers and a trousseau of women’s clothes for Lia de Beaumont to wear on her return to France. She entered elite French society dressed as a woman. A contemporary described her in the terms of the time: ‘He was made to resume the costume of that sex to which in France everything is pardoned. The desire to see his native land once more determined him to submit to the condition, but he revenged himself by combining the long train of his gown and the three deep ruffles on his sleeves with the attitude and conversation of a grenadier, which made him very disagreeable company.’311

  In August 1777, Lia de Beaumont chose a male identity and wore a grenadier’s uniform to volunteer for military service in the American War of Independence, but was prevented from joining the conflict, refused permission to return to London and ordered to continue to wear women’s clothes. She went back to London eventually, but after the execution of some of the d’Éon family during the French Revolution, the family income dried up. She paired up with an actress, Mrs Bateman, to give fencing displays and the two performed a fencing duel at the Haymarket Theatre in 1793.312 She petitioned the French National Assembly to lead a division of female soldiers against the Habsburgs.

  Lia de Beaumont died at her home in London aged 81 and a medical examination revealed ‘male genitals in every respect perfectly formed, breasts remarkably full, and unusual roundness in the formation of limbs’.

  Part 7

  1857–1928

  Separate Spheres

  Protest

  In 1854, a young single woman, aged 27, with no legal training or previous publications to her name, wrote and published a pamphlet on English laws that applied to all women – not just the rich and well-born. Barbara Leigh Smith (1827–91) was not thinking only of her own rights. One of the progressive feminist thinkers who were called the ‘Ladies of Langham Place’ – an informal think tank on women’s rights1 – she set up the English Women’s Journal, to look at the conditions of all women of all classes. She campaigned against slavery, for women’s suffrage and contributed to the founding of Girton College, Cambridge, in 1869.

  Barbara Leigh Smith, unlike other thinkers of her time, considered women as a group – as a sex, not divided by class, wealth, status, colour or religion. This was a historic moment – a turning point in the history of women who had previously seen themselves through their relationship to a man, or in their class position – whether a ‘lady’ or not. Now a few individuals considered women as an identifiable group with shared needs. This new attitude inspired some of the campaigns at the turn of the nineteenth century and its absence explained the failure of others.

  Unity was hard to achieve for women. Some working-class women did not welcome elite women advising or campaigning for them. Some elite women regarded the poor as almost a different species; racism divided women, and marital status divided wives, widows and spinsters.

  Barbara Leigh Smith’s own class position was ambiguous. She was the illegitimate child of a radical elite man, Ben Leigh Smith, and a milliner, Anne Longden. According to his beliefs, all the children had been educated at the local school alongside working-class children. The parents lived together openly, but never married. Barbara Leigh Smith’s pamphlet A Brief Summary in Plain Language of the Most Important Laws Concerning Women Together with a Few Observations Thereon demanded a change in the law for all women. She wrote: ‘A man and wife are one person in law; the wife loses all her rights as a single woman and her existence is, as if entirely absorbed in that of her husband. He is civilly responsible for her wrongful acts . . . and she lives under his protection and cover.’2

  Her summary was deliberately provocative: ‘A woman’s body belongs to her husband she is in his custody: and he can enforce his right by a writ of habeas corpus.’3

  Barbara Leigh Smith (1827–91): feminist law reformer

  Barbara Leigh Smith, engraving in Illustrated London News, 27 June 1891 (Illustrated London News Ltd/Mary Evans)

  Leigh Smith did not exaggerate. Not even habeas corpus – the law enshrined in English life from the twelfth century to prevent anyone being imprisoned unlawfully – could rescue women confined by their husbands.4 As M.S. of Bedford Street, London, wrote to the Daily Telegraph on 21 August 1888: ‘Married when only a girl, after a few years, I am practically a widow, having been obliged, from my husband’s brutality, to seek a separation. This was not until, through his brutality, I lost an eye, principally owing to the very merciful law which compelled me to live with a man until I was maimed for life.’5

  Another powerful voice for a change in the laws on marriage was that of Caroline Norton, an aristocratic author who left her drunken and unfaithful husband George in 1836 intending to live on her earnings as a writer. George successfully claimed her earnings, kidnapped their sons and accused Caroline of an adulterous affair with her friend Lord Melbourne, the prime minister. Melbourne successfully defended himself against a charge of adultery and won his case; but Caroline Norton’s reputation was destroyed. George refused to divorce her and kept their three sons from her. He summoned her (too late) to their younger son’s deathbed, after his fatal accident. She wrote to Parliament supporting a change in the law: ‘What I suffered respecting those children, God knows . . . under the evil law which suffered any man, for vengeance or for interest, to take baby children from the mother.’6

  A wife, whether divorcing an adulterous and abusive husband, or deserted by him, automatically lost her children, whatever the reasons for the break-up. All husbands took custody of all children of any age, and a divorcee might never see her children again.7

  All divorces had to go first before the ecclesiastical court and then through a civil court to compensate a husband for the loss of his adulterous wife, and finally through a private act of Parliament in the House of Lords. This cost an astronomical fee – from £200 to £5,0008 – at a time when a labourer’s weekly wage was 9s 3d.9 It put divorce beyond the reach of anyone but the very wealthy. In reality, only wealthy men could divorce. In two centuries the House of Lords granted 321 divorces to men, and four to women, and two of those were annulments of bigamous marriages. The only two divorces for women were for those whose husbands were adulterous with their own sisters.10

  The Matrimonial Causes Act of 1857 improved the lives of wives, allowing them to keep their earnings from a deserting husband and to apply for maintenance for the children of the dissolved marriage. In addition – as long as they were not the offending partner – they might be allowed to keep their children, and wives might regain the money they brought to the marriage. In 1870, the Married Women’s Property Act allowed all married women, as well as estranged wives, to keep their own income or inheritance. Anna Grenville, first Duchess of Buckingham and Chandos, wrote plaintively to her husband, who had wasted his own fortune and was hoping to work through hers: ‘If I had not brought you one penny being your Wife I should have had a right to your confidence but . . . surely I have an additional & powerful right to be consulted, so large a portion of the property being mine.’11

  Parliamentary opponents feared the acts would ‘create a factitious, an artificial and an unnatural equality between man and woman’. They were completely right. Now that women did not lose everything – children, home, wealth – on divorce, there was more equality in marriage.

  The new court for divorce received a flood of petitions: 253 in the first year, 580 in 1911, and demand grew so rapidly that appeals for maintenance from abused or deserted wives had to be transferred to local magistrates – to the tune of 11,000 a year.12 The changes in the law for married women saved Emily Hall, who had married Edmund Jackson in 1887 but left him a few days after the ceremony. He won a court order that she should return to him (and have sex with him) but she defied him and the court. Edmund kidnapped Emily in 1891 and held her against her will. Her sisters sued for a writ of habeas corpus and the case went before three senior judges.13 Court ushers brought in chairs for the three wives of the judges, who took their seats to observe their husbands hand down the judgment on whether it was legal for a runaway wife to be kidnapped and held by a violently abusive husband.14 The judges, under the steely gaze of their wives, decided that it was not, and Emily Hall was released to her family.

  The judgment proved unpopular, with crowds demonstrating outside her home, singing ‘For he’s a jolly good fellow’ in praise of a man who had kidnapped his wife from her family in broad daylight. Although Emily was not forced to live with her husband, he would not release her from her marriage and she died as his wife – he even tried, unsuccessfully, to attend her deathbed.15

  No longer did women authors avoid criticism of marriage. Mona Caird wrote in the Westminster Review of 1888 that the institution itself was a failure, forcing women to become the property of their husbands, repressing their minds and spirituality. She called for education for girls so that they might be morally and financially independent of husbands, and for greater liberalisation of divorce so that unhappy wives could lead independent lives.16

  Victorian wives replied to her in 27,000 letters, such as this one from a merchant’s wife in Worthing: ‘I myself am a deserted wife and my husband has treated me with exceptional contempt and unkindness, but I am proud to say that so great is my reverence for the sanctity of the marriage vow, that if my husband sent for me to return to him tomorrow; I would go, and with a hearty will and friendly affection, strive to do my duty to him.’17

  Women had absorbed the lessons of teachers, preachers and conduct books that they were born inferior to men and that a woman’s true happiness must lie in the home, in a subservient role. Once established, this belief would prove long-lasting.

  But some women rebelled.

  Edith ‘Biddy’ Lanchester (1871–1966), the daughter of a Hove architect, studied higher maths at London Polytechnic and Botany and Zoology at Birkbeck Library and Scientific Institute. She became a schoolteacher and worked as a secretary for Eleanor Marx, daughter of Karl, and spoke at meetings and rallies.

  In 1895, at the age of 24, she fell in love with a factory worker, James Sullivan, and since she was opposed to the bridal vow of obedience, they decided to live together without marriage. The night before they moved into their home, her father, brothers and a so-called expert, Dr George Fielding Blandford, interviewed Edith Lanchester and agreed that she was insane. The doctor explained his diagnosis: ‘If she had said that she contemplated suicide a certificate might have been signed without question . . . I was equally justified in signing one when she expressed her determination to commit this social suicide.’18

  The doctor issued the certificate giving the cause of her mental illness as ‘over-education’. She was handcuffed by her father, and taken, protesting, to an asylum where she was bullied, coerced and assaulted. Her case caused a scandal. Fellow members of the Socialist Democratic Federation sang the revolutionary anthem ‘The Red Flag’ under her barred hospital window, and after four days she was released, when the commissioners diagnosed her as ‘sane; but foolish’.19 Edith Lanchester went on to have two children with James Sullivan and supported radical causes all her life.

  Biddy Lanchester, a soldier of liberty. She had ‘not been a mere dummy in the hands of the Power; a satellite borrowing light entirely . . . she has shone’

  [And Cover] Biddy Lanchester from Oswald Dawson (ed.), The Bar Sinister and Licit Loves, W.M. Reeves, 1895 (Public domain)

  The Matrimonial Causes Act of 1923 ended the double sexual standard in the law whereby a wife’s adultery was cause for divorce but the husband’s was not. From that year, adultery by either partner in a marriage was grounds for the marriage to be ended. The proportion of petitions filed by wives rose from 41 per cent in 1921 to 62 per cent.20

  Ironically, by making it possible for wives to divorce husbands guilty only of adultery, the many abused and raped wives no longer reported the violence against them in order to obtain a divorce. Marital violence slipped from the records.21

  Some educated women, such as Barbara Leigh Smith, prompted reforms that benefited all women and saw themselves as ‘feminists’ – interested in the progress of all women of every class. But many middle- and upper-class women campaigned for poor women as a form of benevolent patronage. As the Women’s Co-operative Guild explained, ‘Many organisations at this time were run by middle class women doing things “to” working women.’ In contrast, the Women’s Co-operative Guild, founded in 1883, encouraged working-class women into co-operatives to work together on the issues that mattered to them.22

  Protest against the poverty and ill health of working people spread when doctors discovered ‘germ theory’ and understood that infections generated in the slums were being transmitted to upper- and middle-class homes. The government passed the first public health laws in the 1840s. An epidemic of cholera in 1854 – which would kill more than 10,000 people throughout the country – was blamed in Soho, London, on the quality of the drinking water. Dr John Snow showed that the water – contaminated with cholera germs from pollution, overflowing cesspits and open drains – was piped to free street pumps and into the houses of the rich. Disease had no respect for class. In 1858, the ‘great stink’ of the River Thames made all of London unbearable for everyone, from the slums to the Houses of Parliament. Michael Faraday, the scientist, wrote to The Times: ‘The smell was very bad, and common to the whole of the water; it was the same as that which now comes up from the gully-holes in the streets; the whole river was for the time a real sewer.’23

  Fear of the epidemic diseases of the nineteenth century – smallpox, typhus, cholera, yellow fever, scarlet fever and TB, or ‘consumption’ – increased, thanks to a lack of certainty as to how diseases were transmitted, and by the lack of a cure. Campaigns to prevent disease were directed against poor housing, poor hygiene and poor people, something all women could support and that would benefit all women. Health campaigns took on a moralising overtone and to the Methodist founder John Wesley, there was little distinction to be made between ‘dirt’ and ‘sin’:24 ‘Together with the more important lessons, which you endeavour to teach all the poor whom you visit, it would be a deed of charity to teach them two things more, which they are generally little acquainted with: Industry and Cleanliness.’25

  The middle classes took the lesson to heart and believed the cleanliness and order of their houses, and the elegant leisure of their women, distinguished them from their poorer neighbours. Spirituality became respectability and the spiritual passion of the Romantic revolution ended in an outward show in the service of snobbery. Historian Barbara Ehrenreich calls this ‘An organized political offensive against poor and working people . . . – not as sisters, but uplifters.’26

  The campaigning ladies continued to organise themselves into teams to visit entire wards and enter every working-class home. The visitor met either a wife whose husband earned enough money to keep her at home, a woman working at home in sweatshop conditions, or a woman disabled because of pregnancy, injury, incapacity, disease, mental illness or alcoholism. It was a shocking experience for women who had been shielded from reality.

  The visitors offered advice on housekeeping, encouraged church-going, and Sunday schools for children, promoted healthy living – and especially abstinence from alcohol: all the churches offered temperance clubs.27 The hope of the visitors was that their presence alone would transform working-class homes. The National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children said in its report for 1902 that the example of elite women was all that was needed: the ladies’ ‘example of refinement and delicacy of manner, speech and habits unconsciously set before them a higher ideal of living than they have been accustomed to’.28